Even before Mr. Newsom made his announcement, supporters of the death penalty predicted legal challenges to any moratorium. Michele Hanisee, the president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles said that reprieves for condemned inmates would be, “in effect, invalidating the law” that California voters have repeatedly affirmed, despite the liberal values that dominate the state.
“I think it surprises me too, sometimes,” she said. “California is liberal, I think we all know that. We have Hollywood, and the music industry, which I think affects people’s thinking. I think with the death penalty it comes down to specifics of cases. We have serial killers and lots of bad people in California.”
Mr. Newsom has long said he is morally opposed to capital punishment. In 2012, he was the only statewide official to publicly support a ballot initiative to repeal it, and he has said in interviews that the question of what he would do if confronted with the possibility of an execution on his watch weighed heavily on him.
Mr. Newsom’s move will surely be applauded by liberal activists, members of his own party and many conservatives, some of whom have come to see the death penalty as exorbitantly costly and have argued against it on economic grounds.
Three other governors — in Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania — have issued moratoriums on the death penalty. In other states, the practice has been abolished by either legislatures or courts. The latest was Washington, which last year became the 20th state to end capital punishment when the State Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, after a moratorium issued by the governor.
“A moratorium in California has enormous symbolic value,” said Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “It’s part of the momentum we are seeing.”
But in 2016, Californians doubled down on the death penalty, approving a measure that streamlined the appeals process, which has typically taken about 25 years in California for condemned prisoners. The initiative, which was backed by many law enforcement officials and prosecutors, passed with 51 percent of the vote, belying California’s national image as place where politics was steadily moving to the left. It was approved at the same time that voters legalized marijuana.
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